May 27, 2010
By Bloomberg News
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is likely to resist pressure to acknowledge that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship when he flies to Seoul tomorrow to meet South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama.
Photo: China, the North's last ally has advocated a softly-softly approach to North Korea in the vain hope that Kim could follow China's own transition from cultish despotism to economic reform. (Reuters)
China hasn’t followed South Korea, Japan and the U.S. in blaming North Korea for the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun yesterday repeated a call for “restraint” by both sides and said China had no “firsthand information” on the sinking.
China wants to avoid a conflict on the Korean peninsula, and is concerned that taking South Korea’s side may provoke North Korea into further escalations and even lead to war, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
“North Korea is dying, and we can make things worse,” Shen said. “We have assumed North Korea is not a rational actor.”
China has a big stake in stability in Northeast Asia. Japan and South Korea are China’s third- and fourth-biggest trading partners after the European Union and the U.S., with combined two-way trade reaching $485.1 billion in 2009, Chinese customs figures show.
China’s two-way trade with North Korea, at $2.7 billion last year, is less than 1 percent of that total, even though the two countries share a 1,415-kilometer (880-mile) border and an alliance going back to China’s 1950 entry into the Korean War.
“If our region falls into chaos it will undermine the interests of all parties concerned,” Zhang said yesterday.
Responsibility
South Korea, Japan and the U.S. want the North to acknowledge its responsibility for the incident. An international panel on May 20 that included experts from the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Sweden concluded that North Korea was behind the attack. South Korea wants China to also acknowledge the panel’s findings.
“They won’t be able to ignore the truth,” South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan said yesterday at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Seoul. President Lee said on May 24 that “no responsible country in the international community will be able to deny the fact that the Cheonan was sunk by North Korea.”
Clinton is also working to bring China in to forge a unified response.
“We expect to be working together with China in responding to North Korea’s provocative action and promoting stability in the region,” Clinton said May 25 in Beijing at the conclusion of two days of talks.
Cycle of Escalation
China’s government may conclude that taking South Korea’s side will only stoke a cycle of escalation, Shen said. Wen is scheduled to have talks with Lee and meet with both Lee and Hatoyama at a three-nation summit on South Korea’s Jeju Island. He met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il earlier this month in Beijing.
China may be willing to condemn the sinking of the Cheonan in a United Nations Security Council resolution provided that North Korea is not singled out for blame, Shen said. Such an outcome may end the cycle of escalation, he said.
Kim’s regime, which has been relying on handouts since the mid-1990s, is suffering from worsening shortages of goods after its botched currency revaluation late last year. Academics including Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna, said that was aimed at rolling back an experiment with free markets that had loosened the state’s control over jobs, food and patronage.
The UN World Food Program said this month its food aid to North Korea will run out by the end of next month.
UN sanctions imposed on North Korea after its second nuclear test in May 2009 caused international commerce to shrink 9.7 percent last year, according to Seoul-based trade agency, Kotra. The North doesn’t release its own trade figures.
Cutting Ties
North Korea this week said it will cut all ties to the South in response to the findings of the panel. Kim ordered his military to be combat-ready, a Seoul-based dissident group said, sending the Korean won down 3 percent against the dollar on May 25, the biggest one-day drop since March 30, 2009. The South responded by resuming radio broadcasts into North Korea that it called the “voice of freedom.” The won was little changed yesterday at 1,252.28.
South Korea’s broadcasting of propaganda into North Korea was “a deliberate and premeditated provocation” aimed at pushing the peninsula “to the brink of war,” North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said yesterday.
In response to the sinking, the U.S. military is preparing exercises with South Korea in anti-submarine maneuvers and interdicting vessels. The U.S. has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of its Korean War involvement in the 1950s.
“China is doing the thing that best suits China’s interests and everyone’s interest,” Shen said. “China is not pushing the envelope either on the North Korean side to be aggressive or on the South Korean to punish North Korea with warfare.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net
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